Stimulus category is associated with conscious access during motion-induced blindness

Abstract

Stimuli from different categories, such as faces or letters, differ in semantic content and neural representation. How stimulus category relates to conscious access during perceptual suppression has been studied mainly with binocular rivalry and continuous flash suppression, in which suppression arises from interocular competition. Motion-induced blindness (MIB) is a form of perceptual suppression without interocular competition, in which a static peripheral target intermittently disappears from visual awareness in the presence of a continuously moving background. Here, we tested whether target category affects the temporal dynamics of MIB using human faces, familiar Roman letters, and phase-randomized noise images as targets. Faces disappeared more frequently than noise and showed shorter invisible and visible episodes, whereas overall invisibility fraction and latency to first disappearance did not differ reliably. Letters showed a smaller increase in disappearance rate relative to noise, with no reliable difference in invisible episode duration. These findings reveal systematic category-related differences in the temporal organization of MIB and identify associations between stimulus category and the dynamics of conscious access.